10 of the Biggest Lies Society Tells You, And What’s Actually True
If you’re like me, you got to (roughly) age 30 and realized you’d been spoon-fed lies your whole life. Don’t get me wrong, they don’t hand you the lies all at once and shove them down your throat like a duck during gavage, instead they braid them into your lullabies.
They proclaim them proudly in classrooms, in commercials, in the way people look at you when you try something unconventional instead of traditional.
They tell you who to be before you’ve had a chance to ask yourself who you are.
And slowly, without realizing, it becomes gospel to you that you must earn love, that strength is silence, and that if you’re not producing something of value, you’re disappearing.
But what if they were wrong?
What if everything that’s been weighing you down isn’t truth…just training? This is your permission to unlearn all these constrictions and to finally loosen the grip on the script they wrote for you.
Here are ten of the biggest lies society has fed you, and the quiet, defiant truths trying to grow beneath them.
1. “You’re small and insignificant in the universe.”
They want you to believe you're a speck, a little blink in the cosmic story, just one more heartbeat among billions. Average and redundant.
But what they don’t tell you is this: you’re the observer, and observation shapes reality.
Your gaze alters atoms, your grief bends time, the universe unfolds through you, not above you, and not beyond you.
You’re the only thing that can name a star, the only thing that can look at a sky full of chaos and call it beautiful. You’re not small, you’re vast in awareness, in longing, in the electric ache to belong.
I truly believe you’re as significant to the universe as your pinky toe is to you. It’s not necessary for anything to continue functioning, but you would absolutely mourn the loss of it if it left your body. On a physics level though, you’re actually changing reality by being here.
2. “Success means constant productivity.”
People absolutely just love to shove this one down your throat: if you're not producing, you're wasting.
If you rest, you're falling behind.
Capitalism calls it “laziness” when your nervous system pleads for stillness and they’ve dressed up burnout as ambition.
They sell us exhaustion like it’s a badge of honor.
But rest is not retreat, it’s resistance. You need rest for your brain to function. If you give up on rest and allow yourself to keep working past the point of nervous system burn out then you’ve give up so much else in the process. Society wants to keep us busy. Ever hear the phrase “idle hands are the devil's workshop”? They literally don’t want you to go out and question what you’re being fed, they want you to stick to the script you’ve been given. You being constantly productive is the definition of working harder, not smarter.
Look around you, the earth rests, the tides pull back, even stars collapse in silence before they shine again.
You’re not a machine despite what your boss wants you to think, you’re a rhythm.
3. “Emotions make you weak.”
No. Just no. I’ll say it again for the people in the back to hear me, NO. They teach us to silence our grief, apologize for tears, and to “get over it” instead of honoring it.
But emotions are how your soul breathes and how your mind helps you to process the world and what’s been happening around you.
Anger is a boundary that needed to be built.
Sadness is memory in the taste of salty tears running down your perfectly flushed cheek.
Joy is what makes life worth living.
Love is rebellion that forms an alliance to help you take on the entire world.
It takes legitimate courage to feel all the feelings running through your veins.
To bleed out truth in a world that numbs is to defy the norms of our society and allow yourself the freedom to be who you are.
Sitting with your sorrow until it teaches you how to stay is a lesson that everyone needs to learn.
Let your tears fall like rain over a garden, they make room for the bloom that’s inevitable.
Where to begin when you don’t know what to do.
4. “There’s one right path to follow.”
This is a big one, and I just know most of your parents have told you this at one point or another. They hand you the script that you’re supposed to stick to early.
Go to school, get the job that pays you enough to live (or at least cover the bills), get yourself the house, marry Prince Charming (or Princess), have the babies to repopulate the earth. Be content with everything you’ve been given/worked hard for.
But what if your soul doesn’t fit that outline? They’ve been trying to shove us all in boxes but we aren’t squares. Our souls are body-shaped, and even those come with unique curves and angles.
What if your path is a spiral? What if a detour changes everything for you? Life is a constellation, not a straight line, and anyone who says otherwise is trying to sell you something.
We’re taught to fear the unknown, but the wild path is the one that awakens you. Of course society doesn’t want you to wake up. It would disrupt the perfect system they have of leeching off your hard work and somehow benefitting from you being put in your place.
You’re literally allowed to change directions at any point in your life, rewrite your story as many times as you need to before sending it off to the editor that’s the universe. This is me, Michele, giving you the permission you might need to hear. Walk barefoot into a future that doesn’t yet have a name, and look around to pick some flowers on the way.
5. “Your brain is telling you the truth.”
Your brain is a big fat, fat liar. It literally is a Negative-Nancy (sorry Aunt Nancy) that plays all the worst-case scenarios until you’re too scared to even move, frozen like a deer in headlights.
It replays trauma like a broken record, making you relive the worst moments of your life on repeat like a favorite song. Ever wake up in the middle of the night and think about that time in second grade you stuttered when reading in front of the whole class?
Your mind fills silence with imagined catastrophes and calculates the odds of a meteorite falling on your head.
But just because it’s loud doesn’t mean it’s real.
Your mind is a survival machine, not a truth machine, it’s programmed to protect you, not to soothe you. You’re not your thoughts, you’re just the one watching them. Learn to question the voice that says you aren’t enough, because you are. Don’t take every thought you have as the truth because recall alters past memories more than you realize.
If you’re going to be lied to, isn’t it better to tell yourself beautiful lies and create goals that seem absurd to others but can literally happen if you just believe in it enough?
Ways your mind is lying to you
6. “You must earn love.”
This one hits hard for me personally, because my husband had this shoved down his throat as a child. If you’re reading this and you’re the same, please, I’m begging you to listen closely.
In the withholding of warmth, the idea of conditional approval, and in the twisted idea that love must be deserved, we’re crippling ourselves.
Love is not a wage you get paid in, hate to break it to you. Society loves to tell you that love is a bonus that you’ll get if you work hard enough and hit all your life quotas.
But real love isn’t a transaction.
You’re not a resume, a to-do list of worthiness, or a task to be managed by someone else.
You deserve love on your worst day, in the ache of your becoming, in the unraveling of your soul.
You don’t have to be “better” to be loved, you only have to be real. That’s literally enough. Anyone who says or makes you feel otherwise is just wrong. You’re born worthy of it.
7. “Happiness is the goal.”
Happiness is marketed like a product to you these days, it’s like a place you arrive at once you've bought enough, achieved enough, and become enough of whatever it was you were meant to become.
Joy is not a destination though, so I’m sorry you were ever told that.
Happiness is a flicker in a conversation, it’s the sun on your face after a long winter, it’s laughing with someone who finally sees you until your side aches.
The real goal in this life is to be present.
Be whole in your sorrow and steady in your peace and understand that happiness comes in waves, it’s not a constant state of being. Anyone who says otherwise is trying to sell you something.
Feel all life has to offer and keep going.
8. “Pain is a detour.”
I know that this is probably covered in the emotion thing, but I feel the need to touch on this aspect of it. Pain isn’t a mistake by the universe, it’s the path to get to where you need to be.
Pain is the thing that cracks you wide open and softens your edges to strengthen your spine. Empathy isn’t possible without suffering. You can’t know the highs when they come if you’ve never experienced a low, otherwise you’re stuck in a plateau. And before you feel sorry for yourself for being the one that has to go through something hard, let me assure you that we are all here with you. Every single one of us has suffered in ways that are unique to us, and while what some went through might feel trivial compared to others, pain isn’t a competition.
Pain is a teacher that shows up completely uninvited, but always leaves wisdom behind. You were never meant to be untouched, you were meant to be transformed.
Let it shape you, not shatter you.
9. “You have to always be strong.”
They tell you to be tough through everything you go through.
Never show the cracks in your foundation, cover them with rugs and hide them from everyone else.
But real strength is softness, and it’s asking for help when your pride wants silence.
It’s collapsing into someone’s arms for a hug when the world goes sharp and you can’t handle it all.
Strength isn’t the clenched jaw, it’s the open hands of someone asking to take yours.
Some of the strongest people you’ll ever meet are the ones who had every reason to shut down, and still chose to love anyway.
If you hide your cracks under carpets, how do you ever expect to fix them? It’s smarter to have your family or friends come in and help you fill them to reinforce your foundation. Don’t be scared to ask for help, it’s brave and it’s strength.
10. “You’re alone.”
This might be the cruelest lie, and one that I really wish to unravel in your mind (if you’ve made it this far).
This is the lie that convinces us to suffer in silence, to hide the ache and mask the panic brewing deep inside of us.
But you’re not alone.
There are others walking through the same storm, others who have cried the same tears, and others who will recognize your pain without needing a single word.
We’re more connected than we’re allowed to believe. We’re mirrors, witnesses of being, just simply echoes of each other. It’s also never been easier in our history than it is now to find those others. The internet is a miracle wrapped up in wires and created with plugs and charged electrons. You can find your tribe if you look for them. They’re out there, waiting to be found, or already looking for you as well.
Don’t forget, society had fed you lies dressed as lessons and called them wisdom and love.
But the truth is much quieter than that.
Ask the questions you were always told not to ask, because that changes everything.
Once you see the strings, you can stop dancing for the puppeteers.
You don’t need to become someone else, you just need to come home to yourself.
The lies were loud, but you can become louder. You can breathe life back into society in a way they don’t want you to, and find yourself in the process.
